You’ve got no mail: AOL blocks emails containing references to petition circulating in opposition to changes in AOL’s email service

According to John Davidson in The Australian Financial Review (9/10/2007, p.30) last year AOL blocked emails that contained references to a petition that was circulating in opposition to changes in AOL’s email service. (AOL said it was a “glitch”).

Aussie internet services go-slow on certain traffic: Some Australian internet service providers, too, have started “de-prioritising” certain types of internet traffic they don’t like — usually stuff that has too much intellectual property, rather than too little: the first step on the road to blocking traffic they don’t like.

Pay per use in the future? Telstra, too, has gone on the record threatening to one day start charging “purveyors of the content” which is to say, the likes of Google and Skype, for the carriage of that content, conveniently forgetting that it’s already charged its own subscribers. Presumably, payers who refuse to pay will have their content either degraded or blocked on the Telstra network.